Posted in: Games, GDC, Video Games | Tagged: conan, Conan Uncoquered, Funcom, GDC, GDC 2019, Petroglyph

[Hands-on] Conan Unconquered is Somehow Mundane

Petroglyph and Funcom's survival RTS Conan Unconquered is many things, but while you might expect it to be absurd, it's far more straightforward. In fact, Unconquered is pretty much a standard RTS game.

As several of the team at Petroglyph are former Command & Conquer devs, there was bound to be similarities between the games. However, I expected more over-the-top shenanigans from a Conan game published by Funcom. However, outside of some flavor elements and the ridiculously overpowered hero characters, Conan Unconquered is remarkably mundane.

The early gameplay revolves mostly around building your city with the usual resource management, then surviving waves of enemies. While your average thrall units aren't particularly durable, the hero units are pretty darn powerful. And they get more abilities as they level, so your scaling is pretty crazy. You can also pause the real-time action in order to figure out a plan and then hop back in to execute it, allowing you the benefit of RTS without all of the obvious drawbacks.

Essentially, if your hero dies, you've done something horrendously wrong.

That said, the later waves are pretty dodgy and can go wrong, even in the hands of one of Petroglyph's devs. The late-stage demo at GDC was hands-off for press, but we did get to watch the absolute destruction the game is capable of at higher difficulties. Our hands-on demo was designed around the beginning stages, which are far easier. However, they do show off the basics of the game, which are pretty standard.

And honestly, that might be a good thing, considering.

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